Trend: From Wellness Tech to Technological Wellness
We’re inundated with technology promising to make us well–whether it’s smart home gyms or wearable devices. We predict more people will grasp that what matters more is “technological wellness,” a movement that addresses how—and how often—we engage with technology at large: where we start to treat our digital intake like we do our food intake.
Between fitness wearables, smart home gyms, and futuristic sleep headbands, there is no shortage of technologies promising to make us well. But the truth is that most technologies—the technologies that make up the vast majority of our screen time—are harming our health, not helping it. Our screentime, and the number of wellness technologies, surged during the pandemic, and even as we emerge from it, so much more of our life–from work to working out–has been pushed online. The average person now spends about seven hours a day staring at screens. Where is any real wellness when we spend hours a day on Zoom meetings and doomscroll bad news and Instagram all night?
Our 2022 trend predicts a new kind of “technological wellness” will emerge: one that is less about buying another wellness app, wearable, or device, and more about putting health at the very center of how—and how often—we engage with technology in general.
Awareness is rising about the tech industry’s obsession with making things as addictive and “frictionless” as possible, keeping people strung along on their platforms: endless newsfeeds; one-click purchases; auto-play (when video and audio start automatically) that zaps us with endless dopamine hits; “live” functions that manufacture the idea that “you can’t miss this”; gamification mechanisms that keep egging you on; and algorithms that put the most polarizing, ugly content at the top. Awareness is rising that all of these addicting, frictionless experiences are about the almighty dollar: the more time we spend scrolling, the more ads are served, the more data is collected, and the more money flows into the pockets of Big Tech companies.
Our trend explored how the tide is now turning: how more research shows that this situation is trashing our mental health, how Big Tech is moving to right some of its wrongs, and how governments are cracking down on companies that engineered this avalanche of addictive, dangerous content. Since the trend was released in February, there has been much action.
- How more governments are cracking down, such as the UK, whose new legislation gets strict with social media companies enabling harmful online content and threatens to hit Facebook or TikTok with an up to $10 billion fine.
- How new social media apps such as BeReal (now growing like wildfire) are creating a space aimed at fighting all the performance, bragging and toxic beauty on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat.
- How there are more grassroots “log off” movements rallying people to just turn it off.
Governments Get Strict:
There’s suddenly much more legislation from global governments (being proposed or enacted) that will hold tech and social media platforms accountable as never before. Screen addiction is suddenly a pretty hot topic with lawmakers.
China was early in leading this charge. In 2021, the government released a three-year plan to bring algorithms under state control, foreshadowing a future of tighter restrictions for the world’s largest tech companies. Among the key points within China’s sweeping draft laws was that companies must not set up algorithms that push users to become addicted. China then quickly banned minors from playing online games Monday through Thursday, and limited them to just one hour of play on Fridays and weekends between 8pm and 9pm. A month after China’s algorithm regulations were announced, Douyin—the Chinese version of TikTok—restricted users under 14 years of age to using the app for a maximum of 40 minutes a day between the hours of 6am and 10pm. The platform made yet another move to combat addiction last fall with the launch of unskippable pauses. When Douyin users have been scrolling for too long, their endless stream of bite-sized videos gets interrupted by a five-second pause nudging them with prompts like “put the phone down,” “go to bed,” or “work tomorrow.”
In the US there are currently more than 28 bills pending in a dozen states that aim to hold social media companies accountable for their addictive, harmful models. At the federal level, a coalition of 100 groups that advocate for children’s wellbeing just urged the Senate to move forward on bipartisan legislation (The Kids Online Safety Act) that will make social media companies liable for the ways they harm young people–and the committee should vote on it this month. In California, a new bill just passed the State Assembly that will allow parents to sue the big social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram for $25,000 for each kid they have addicted and harmed.
In the UK, the government introduced a new Online Safety Bill to Parliament in late April. The bill contains wide-ranging legislation that would regulate the behavior of a large group of Internet platforms (from social media giants to online gaming companies) around so many different online safety and harmful content issues. It’s being hailed as a revolutionary piece of legislation that could shape social media regulation around the world (more below).
Big Tech Tries to Right Its Wrongs:
More tech companies are racing to clean up their act before falling victim to ever-harsher restrictions. 2021 and 2022 have been years of “regulate or be regulated,” and platforms were busy.
One major hot-button social media topic is algorithmic ranking. Over the years, platforms have been criticized for prioritizing controversial content that fuels polarization and thus, harms mental health. This was recently confirmed when internal Facebook documents revealed that beginning in 2017, the platform’s algorithm rated the “angry” emoji reaction as five times more valuable than “likes.” The logic behind this weighting is simple: anger tends to spark a more emotional reaction, keeping people more engaged, and consequently, making Facebook more money. But that strategy is on its way out. In 2021, Facebook introduced a handful of new features that gave users more control of their news feed, including an easier way to turn off the app’s algorithmic ranking and see content in the order it was posted instead. A similar option is now being rolled out across Instagram as well; starting in the first half of 2022, Instagram will give users three different home feed options, including one that’s chronological.
Another way platforms are aiming to right their wrongs is by regulating the content itself. In 2021, for instance, Pinterest joined forces with the National Eating Disorders Association to ban all ads with language or imagery related to weight loss—a meaningful step to prioritize mental health over ad revenue in a year where weight loss brands spent 89% more on advertising compared to 2020. In a similar vein, Instagram now allows users to limit sensitive content, Facebook has banned advertisers from targeting minors, and YouTube has blocked all anti-vaccine content.
More Tech as the Antidote to Tech: From Apps That Measure Your “Digital Nutrition” to Less Toxic Social Media Platforms
Clearly, technology is not making us well. So how are we fixing it? With more tech, of course! There’s a fast-growing list of new technologies and platforms that solve problems caused by tech in the first place.
One example: AeBeZe Labs calls its solution Digital Nutrition. The startup is arming people with the tools to better understand the “nutritional value” of the content they consume, measuring its impact on serotonin levels, endorphins, focus, imagination, and more. The ultimate goal is to help people make smarter, healthier digital decisions, which AeBeZe’s founder says starts with universal labeling. “There is a standardized label on all foods and packaged beverages, on prescription medication, even on your mattress. The last frontier that remains—the wild west—is content.” AeBeZe imagines a not-so-distant world where such digital nutrition labels are included on the videos we watch, as well as in the classrooms that kids grow up in. The company was acquired by social app and unicorn IRL in December, who, says TechCrunch, was particularly interested in AeBeZe’s Daybreak, a mobile calendar where users track their mood over time so they can choose daily sessions designed to elevate their mood by watching, listening or tapping through specific doses of healthy content.
The new social media platform, BeReal, was designed as a counter to all the performance, posturing and bad vibes at the big social sites like Instagram or Snapchat. It aims at authenticity: it asks you to post just one candid image/post a day right at that moment so you can’t stage it (i.e., you’re at your desk or just hanging out, etc.) There are no “likes,” no ads, no impossibly perfect celebs and influencers, no photo doctoring and filters, and, in no time, it’s become the most downloaded social app behind Tik Tok. (More below).
More Log-Off Movements:
The tech solutions trying to save us from the heavy mental toll of tech wouldn’t be necessary, of course, if we focused on the real, root issue: try logging off. And there are more movements rallying us to do just that. Last week, The New York Times profiled teen Emma Lembke who founded the Log Off Movement in 2020, an organization that is encouraging and helping other teens reduce their time on the Internet and rethink their relationship to it.
The Future? With the Coming Metaverse, Technological Wellness Becomes Critical
The world’s biggest tech companies are already racing to build a world where we interact via virtual reality headsets and trade our glasses for augmented reality contacts. In the coming Metaverse, the physical world and human contact will recede further and it will become increasingly difficult to grasp where the real world ends and the virtual one begins. We’re going to need new digital log-off behaviors, new frictions, new boundaries, and new laws like never before, if we have any hope of staying sane and grounded.
The technological wellness trend and movement are about pausing, asking the tough questions, and developing everyday technologies with health in mind, so we can create a better world. Looking forward, we foresee wellness and technology forging a healthier kind of relationship.
And if the wellness world was an earlier pioneer in creating things like digital detoxes at resorts, the industry needs to think further. The wellness industry has a huge opportunity to lead this movement; help people understand how tech affects our minds, bodies and emotions; and contribute to reset our tech habits at scale.
This Trendium is based on From Wellness Tech to Technological Wellness, trend from the 2022 Global Wellness Trends Report.
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